The Brash Ballad of Billy Joel

By -- Jay Cocks

Hey, Virginia Callahan. Remember Mrs. Joel's kid, Billy, from down the street? The greaser who took the piano lessons and had his shifty eye on you? Well, he just wrote a song about you. And you won't like it.

The song hangs tough, rocks hard, and deliberately echoes one of those "baby, let's make out" tunes from the 1950s, the ones where the guys were always trying to get the girls to go ... well, if not further than they wanted, then at least further than they thought they should. Billy gets right down to business. "Come out Virginia, Don't let me wait/ You Catholic girls start much too late," he sings in his bruised tenor, his memory for details ("You got a nice white dress and/ a party on your confirmation") as sharp as his point:

You say your mother told you

all

that I could give you was a

reputation

She never cared for me

But did she ever say a prayer

for me?

The title of the song is the real snapper, an old tough-guy cliche flipped around and twisted like a blade --Only the Good Die Young.

Well, it was a one-way romance, and maybe Billy Joel is getting a little of his own back. Now is certainly the time for it; since a wide-ranging, heavily attended concert tour and the release last September of his fifth album, The Stranger, the returns have been heavy, and all flowing in his direction. The album glided into the Top Five this week, and it has long since gone way past platinum (1 million copies sold) with ease.

Joel's best songs have the brash humor, the sad, sometimes lavish sentiment that still stirs faint echoes of the boys down on the corner, harmonizing on the Top 40. Raised in a solidly middle-class section of Hicksville, Long Island, Joel, 28, began piano lessons at four, but also boxed in school and hung out with the sort of hell raisers that would have made Virginia's mother double-lock the door. Here is how he tells it: "You got into junior high, you could go one of three ways. You could be a collegiate, a hitter or a brownie--the kid who wears brown shoes with white socks, carries a schoolbag and always gets the monitor jobs."

Joel's career as a hood was long on style, short on rough stuff. Never officially graduating from high school, he drifted into a few local Long Island rock groups and recorded one solo album, which resulted in little notice and a prolonged legal wrangle with his management. Joel and his girlfriend Elizabeth lit out for L.A. To pay the rent, he played cocktail piano for half a year in a neighborhood bar called the Executive Room that advertised BILL MARTIN AT THE KEYBOARD. Joel emerged from this honky-tonk penance with a new wife (Elizabeth), a new contract from a major company (Columbia), and a new album whose title song, Piano Man, became a hit single in 1974.

That record was his first brush with the big time, but Joel hardly had the chance to settle back. His albums after Piano Man sold well, but not excitingly. His audience was not expanding appreciably beyond a loyal band of fanatic followers located mostly in the Northeast, possibly because his music was too varied --and sometimes a little too slick--to classify.

"I'm a big melody freak," says Joel. Indeed, "big" neatly describes the size of the melodies as well as his enthusiasm for them. As demonstrated by his current hit single, a graceful ballad called Just the Way You Are, Joel harks back to the luxuriant strains of superb song craftsmen like Harold Arlen as much as he follows in the tradition of masters of rock-'n'-roll delirium like Phil Spector. His songs have also been covered by belters like Streisand and jazz stylists like Bobby Scott, and seem easily to snuggle into whatever groove comes up.

Joel enjoys the malleability of his music, just as he revels in the seemingly contradictory influences that molded him since he began improvising piano exercises to relieve the boredom of daily lessons when he was a kid. He counts for major inspiration the metric acrobatics of Dave Brubeck's Take Five and the seamless jazz fantasies of Oscar Peterson. He dreams of the day Ray Charles will pull one of the best songs out of the Joel portfolio, "and I'll hear New York State of Mind at the World Series." He prides himself on being a rocker, but wears a tie and jacket onstage and during performances does cocky, funny monologues about the sartorial and pharmacological indulgences of his peers.

All these divergent strains and spiky attitudes have assigned Joel uncertain territory between rock and pop and have tended to keep most big-league rock critics at a distance from his work. "I don't need that." he comments, street kid's swagger still intact. "Long, learned reviews are just hard to read."

If The Stranger does not fully reconcile all his dreams and influences, it at least contrives to let them all exist well together. Under the direction of gifted Producer Phil Ramone, the new record has a harder, more astringent sound. Joel's lyrics can be lilting, wistful or full of bite.

He is at his best taking unsentimental trips back to home territory, exploring the dead ends and defeats of middle-class life in a song like Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, a melancholy, hard-driving chronicle of the battered future of high school sweethearts Brenda and Eddie, "the popular steadies/ And the king and the queen/ of the prom":

Nobody looked any finer

Or was more of a hit at the

Parkway Diner

We never knew we could want more

than that out of life.

There is great sympathy in these songs, observations that can be caustic and still stay fond. Work like this makes it quite plain that for all the contradictions, Billy Joel is writing and singing some of the best pop music in the neighborhood. It might even make Virginia Callahan think twice.

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